Picture this: a man falls in love with a woman who is suffering from a horrible disease. Desperate to save her life, he tries everything he can but she ends up succumbing and passing away at a young age. So far, so weepy tragi-romance. Wracked with grief, the man vows not to let death stand in the way of their love and tries to preserve it for ever. Literally. This is the extremely disturbing story of Elena de Hoyos and Carl Tanzler, who was convinced they were meant to be together for eternity and didn’t let the fact that Elena was dead get in his way. While Carl may have been acting in his own tragic Snow White-esque romance, Elena was unwittingly co-starring in something more akin to Frankenstein or Psycho, with a proto Ed Gein in the leading role. So be prepared for squirms aplenty and also ask yourself this: where does a homemade plane fit in?
The Main Characters
Let’s start with meeting our two protagonists. Character one will be referred to by us as Carl Tanzler, although other names he went by include “Georg Karl Tänzler”, “Karl Tänzler von Cosel” and the not-at-all-pompous sounding “Count Carl von Cosel”. Was he actually a count? Nope, but we’ll come to that little link in a minute. He is frequently referred to as “Carl von Cosel” in other sources but I’m sure you’ll remember they’re the same person.
Tanzler was born in 1877 in Dresden, in what was then called the German Empire. According to his memoirs, he had a vision of a girl when he was about 12 years old. He wrote:
“True enough, at the age of twelve I had a dream, or rather a vision of a very beautiful girl in a white dress, reclining on a rococo settee, which I painted on a piece of paper then.”
It seems that he had other things on his mind at the time than a ghostly girlfriend, however, as he goes on to say:
“My boyish interests were…entirely concentrated on electricity, on chemical experiments; and on flying machines, astronomy; in fact all phenomena of the universe.”
Tanzler wrote his memoir “The Secret of Elena’s Tomb” in 1940, using the name Karl Tanzler von Cosel, and, changing names aside, it’s very hard to get a grip on Tanzler as his writings are chock full of information that comes across as extremely romanticized and also hard to believe.
There’s no doubt that he was a prodigious tinkerer, however, did he really obtain 9 degrees from the University of Leipzig? In his memoirs, he comes across as a self-confessed uber-nerd. He wasn’t interested in girls, drinking or smoking but:
“Engrossed in science after science, I took, at the age of twenty-four, final degrees as master of arts in medicine, in philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry etc., having passed nine different examinations beside the S.M.”
Maybe it was easier to do nine degree courses at the end of the 19th century but this still seems rather unlikely. It was during his studies, though, that he was once again visited by some ghostly females and this time he knew who one of them was. Carl had been hard at work on various sciencey things but had noticed that over the course of a couple of nights, strange things had started happening, including furniture moving around and a large mercury pump smashing on the floor.
He woke up in the middle of the third night to see an older lady bending over him, who he recognised as Countess Anna von Cosel, an apparent relative who had died over 100 years before Carl was born. This is why he started using the title of “Count von Cosel”, by the way.
Anna Constantia von Brockdorff became the King of Poland’s chief mistress in 1705 and was given the title “Imperial Countess of Cosel” which Carl Tanzler decided to start using, despite there being no proven link between them. None of his relatives in the decades between had ever used a Count or Countess title so it seems as though Tanzler just used it to seem like something he was not.
Anyway, the alleged Countess of Cosel appeared before him and said she’d been trying to get his attention. According to his memoirs she said:
“Look here, Carl, I have brought you the bride whom someday you will meet.”
The Countess stepped aside and Carl describes the girl who then came forward:
“Spellbound I saw, framed in long, dark, black tresses, a young girl’s face, so beautiful I can’t attempt to describe it.”
This seemed to set him off on a quest to find out more about not only the supernatural world in general, but his future bride in particular. This was an actual quest which he called his “odyssey” and he ended up travelling all over the world. In a cemetery in Genoa, Italy, he found the next link in his chain. The memory of his mystery bride’s face was indelibly printed in his mind and, all of a sudden, he found a marble statue who looked just like her.
The statue was in memory of a woman called Elena who had died at the age of 22. Tanzler wrote:
“The figure of a live girl in the same white dress seemed to detach itself from the statue and slowly walk past where I stood, looking at me. There was no doubt in my mind that she was indeed the apparition of my youthful days and that she was alive.”
His next chunk of years are a bit hazy but he had some writings published in the Rosicrucian Digest in 1939 and the editor’s note includes this information:
“Many years ago, Carl von Cosel travelled from India to Australia with the intention of proceeding to the South Sea Islands. He paused in Australia to collect equipment and suitable boats, and to become acquainted with prevailing weather and sea conditions. However, he became interested in engineering and electrical work there, bought property, boats, an organ, an island in the Pacific…so that he was still in Australia at the end of ten years.
He had just begun to build a trans-ocean flyer when the war broke out and the British military authorities placed him in a concentration camp for ‘safe-keeping’ along with many officers from India and China who were prisoners of war. Later he was removed to Trial Bay to a castle-like prison on the cliffs, and there the work described in this narrative was accomplished.”
So it seems that Carl was quite wealthy, had a lot of free time to travel, having gone to India first and then buying a ton of stuff including, apparently, an island. He was in the middle of building a boat when he was imprisoned at the start of the First World War, because he was a German, albeit living in Australia so he was about as far from the fighting as it was possible to get. The note gives the impression that Tanzler was just tinkering about and living the life, but according to Ben Harrison who wrote a book called “Undying Love” about this story, Tanzler may well have been in the German army after all. He writes:
“Von Cosel reportedly told Dr. Alvan Foraker that he had been an officer in the German submarine division. According to several people, including Tom Hambright, historian at the Monroe County Library, von Cosel received a monthly check that he picked up at the post office. Its mysterious source adds to the questions surrounding his past. It could have been a pension for his military service.”
Tanzler had a knack for skating over inconvenient facts and merging time periods together so if you read certain accounts of his back story, you would believe that after the war, he stayed with his mother for a few years before she encouraged him to move to the US to join his sister to continue his freewheeling bachelor lifestyle. In fact, he went back to Germany and, two years later in 1920, married Doris Schäfer and together they had two daughters, Ayesha and Clarista, also referred to as Crystal. In 1926 he did indeed make the move to the US, via Cuba, ending up in Zephyrhills in Florida where his sister lived.
His wife and daughters joined him the next year, but Tanzler promptly said auf wiedersehen and high-tailed it for Key West where he started using the name Carl von Cosel and seemingly forgot his previous life existed. He also attached the “Count” title to his name and started swaggering about using a cane as an aristocratic prop. He got a job at a Key West hospital and, despite having no formal medical training, talked his way into the role of a radiology assistant.
In his memoirs, he writes:
“The Marine Hospital at Key West employed me as a pathologist and x-ray specialist”
The truth, it seems, was a lot less glamorous, with one former colleague describing him as “destitute.” Ben Harrison writes in “Undying Love”:
“Willing to take any job at the beginning, he was an attendant who cleaned up after procedures.”
At this point, Carl was 50 years old and soon to meet the mysterious woman of his visions. So let’s find out more about her. Unfortunately, we have a lot less information to go on, mainly because she died young and didn’t write a memoir like Carl, but because she always seems to play second fiddle in the story of her own death, let’s give Elena her moment on centre stage.
Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was commonly known as Elena. She was the second of three daughters, born in 1909 to a Cuban family who had moved to Key West but subsequently fell upon hard financial times. Her childhood was spent having fun amidst her extended family and friends, with singing and dancing being two of her favourite pastimes. Her singing was so good, in fact, that Elena had performed at the San Carlos theatre several times for various events.
The Hoyos family was poor but Elena took pride in her appearance, and was widely acknowledged as a fledgeling beauty. She had striking black ringlets, a playful demeanor, and, according to an old neighbour, was “full of life.”
In February 1926 at the age of 18, Elena wore a tiered, mid-length wedding dress and held a large bouquet of white roses to get married to her fiancé, Luis Mesa. Unfortunately for Elena, though, it seems that her happy life ended soon after the wedding. She became pregnant within months, but suffered a miscarriage towards the end of the year.
After that, her health took a downward turn. At first, her family put her deteriorating condition and increasingly pallid complexion down to grief after the loss of her baby, but Elena developed a cough and eventually went to see a doctor. If you’ve put two and two together, you might have realised that Elena had contracted tuberculosis, which is easily treatable now, but back in the late 1920s, there was no treatment and in that span of a few years, it was the number one cause of death in Key West.
Also, Elena had a really bad strain of it, and because of the rapid rate it progressed, it was known as “hasty consumption.”
While he denied that it was Elena’s illness that caused their marriage to break up, her husband Luis didn’t stick around too long and ended up leaving Elena for another woman and another city. Although it’s depressing to say this, Luis might have made the smart choice as tuberculosis is contagious and Elena’s entire immediate family ended up dying of the disease in the years to come. But let’s stick with the story for now and find out what happened when Elena met Carl.
The Meet Cute
Elena was sick. Carl worked in a hospital. This is the scene of their fateful meeting where Carl would fully shed his former life and Elena would unknowingly be drawn into a horrific post mortem second act. It started casually enough.
In April 1930, Elena had gone to the US Marine Hospital for some tests. Yes, it was originally set up as a military hospital but, as it was the only one around, it was also available to the general public. The man who took her blood that first time was Carl Tanzler and he immediately recognised Elena as the woman who was destined to be his bride. His memoir states:
“I looked into a face of unearthly beauty, the face of my dreams and visions - the face of the bride which had been promised to me by my ancestor forty years before.”
He also describes her hands as “the loveliest I had ever seen” and her voice as “a mockingbird’s song in spring.”
There is no record of what Elena thought about Carl, but as she was 32 years younger than him and a married beauty, while he was a 50 year old bald, bearded, bespectacled man poking a needle into her finger, she probably didn’t give him a second look. No shade to bald, beared, bespectacled men, of course. I hear some are pretty fit. While she left and went about her day, Carl quickly got obsessed.
He noticed that her name on her forms was prefixed with “Mrs” and was thrown into some passing despair that she was married, but quickly got over it. In his memoir he writes:
“What, after all, did it matter if she belonged to another; hadn’t I also belonged to another, years ago?”
This is Tanzler’s last reference to his existing wife, someone whom he had legally married and never legally divorced. It seems as though, in Carl’s mind, the fact that he just abandoned his family meant that he was no longer actually married. Obviously this is incorrect, but it’s like Carl’s compartmentalization skills were off the charts. He goes on to say:
“what was there in a husband’s name or even in a husband’s existence? All this had very little to do with me and Elena. The main thing was that I found her and she was ill and that I was best qualified and in a position to help her.”
Carl was overjoyed when, at their next appointment, Elena mentioned that her husband had left her. He could also see from x-ray results that she was very sick and later found out that she had deteriorated and was spending all her time in bed at her parents’ house. Whereas in most cases, the x-ray tech themselves would have no further involvement in a patient’s treatment, Carl was not most cases.
He had his own equipment which was apparently “home-built million volt equipment” but it was too big to move, so he brought other bits and bobs to Elena at her family home. He did things such as putting electrical tubes down her throat and applying high-frequency radiation baths over her neck and chest area. She apparently said that the treatments were helping and seemed very grateful, but we only have Tanzler’s word to go on.
He also mentions in his memoirs at this point that she was wearing his “diamond engagement ring” and he was referring to her as “his bride”. As a reminder, both parties were still legally married to other people and we don’t have Elena’s side of the story. He brought her clothes, fruit and a catalogue from a jeweler and said she could pick out whatever she wanted. She allegedly chose three things and a wedding ring, saying he didn’t have to get them all, but he writes:
“Naturally, I ordered all the three for her.”
He also dissolved gold into liquid for her to drink a drop and bought her a new bed, silk sheets and a dresser as well as buying her silk stockings and silk dresses. What her parents thought about this avid attention is not known, but Tanzler did write that they thought his treatments were having negative effects, whereas he, of course, thought they were working a treat. He disparagingly wrote: “Ignorance, as usual” and described them as “lesser human stars” in comparison with Elena who “shone like the sun”. They did also protest the amount of electricity all his gadgets were using up, but Tanzler said he’d pay the bill for that, too.
Where he was getting his money from is not clear. He wouldn’t have been making much as an assistant radiologist, definitely not enough to cover all the equipment he was building plus bedroom furniture sets and a diamond ring. And as well as all this, Tanzler was using what spare time he had to work on an aeroplane that he’d been building for some time. His dream was to fly Elena out to the island he’d allegedly bought when on his travels in Australia.
Over the course of Elena’s private treatments, her health waxed and waned and Tanzler spent his evenings playing music to her. One day he overheard people saying that Elena’s family wanted to move her to a mental asylum so he stepped in and wrote a letter that was supposed to prevent her from being removed from her house. He told her to keep it under her pillow. Here’s what it said:
“To Whom It May Concern:
This is to testify that Elena Hoyos is my wife and that her mental status is normal. She is perfectly sane and under the medical care of Dr. Lombard and myself. I will not tolerate any interference or her removal to an institution or asylum.
Signed: Carl von Cosel, Pathologist in the Public Health Service.”
As you can see, this is a perfectly normal note to write. The fact that Elena was not his wife, he was not a pathologist and he had no real claim on what her family thought might be best for her are just minor details. The reason that she was allegedly going to be committed, according to Tanzler, was because she had stated that she wanted to become a Catholic.
This seems strange as it was likely that Elena was already a Catholic and why her family would want her shut away when it was clear she didn’t have long to live anyway, is also a mystery. It’s probably best to assume, as with a lot of Tanzler’s writings, that it might be a fantastical reimagining of what actually happened. Carl tended to Elena for months but, on the 25th of October 1931, she died at the age of 22, the same age and with the same name as the woman’s statue that had given Tanzler his vision in the Italian cemetery.
The Funeral
Because of his apparent wealth, at least next to the Hoyos family, it was left to Tanzler to arrange Elena’s burial, which he did. While he was doing so, however, he had a strange feeling come over him where he believed in his heart that his prophesied bride wasn’t actually really dead. He managed to keep this feeling to himself while sorting out the funeral, and Elena’s body lay in an open coffin in her room for mourners to visit before the ceremony. During this time, Tanzler sat with her and said he sensed her spirit:
“floating in the room, fairy-like or rather angel-like, from flower to flower.”
Before the coffin lid was closed, Tanzler gave his beloved a kiss, and slipped a letter next to her skin. Rather disturbingly, but with a heavy foreshadowing of his later actions, Tanzler likens the funeral procession to a wedding march. After Elena was buried, he writes:
“A strange kind of new life now began for me. It was something like a rebirth after these last two oppressing and depressing years. Now at least nobody could take my Elena away from me. Although I could not see her any longer, I felt her presence all the time.”
And if she had been even the smallest bit still alive, she would have felt his presence all the time too, because he visited her grave site every day, as well as moving into her family home and sleeping in her bed. Yes, he had paid for it, on an installment plan as it turned out, but even so, this is some strange behaviour. He told Elena’s mother to keep the jewels he had bought, as one day he would give them back to Elena.
When she protested that Elena would be nothing but bones soon, maybe that clicked something in Tanzler’s mind as he proclaimed he wouldn’t let her decay and that he’d even buy hair if necessary to make a new wig for her. Luckily for him, Elena’s mother actually had large amounts of Elena’s hair as Elena had cut it short the year before and her mother had kept the long locks which she ended up giving to Tanzler.
While he was living with the Hoyos family, Tanzler was busy working on plans for a larger, more secure tomb for Elena’s body, as she had been buried in quite a shallow grave. He bought some of the land around her grave and proceeded to get a concrete tomb, or mausoleum, constructed, which took about three months. During that time, Elena was disinterred and temporarily housed in the funeral home, where Tanzler bought a better casket for her, as the original coffin was in poor shape, thanks to flooding and damage done during the original burial.
He worked with the mortician to move Elena from her old coffin to her new one, and had bought all the necessary materials to get the job done. He’d also made an incubation tank himself “just in case it should be needed.”
When Elena’s body was removed from the first coffin, Tanzler says: “Decay had set in in a most disheartening manner.”
Nevertheless, he cleaned her up using various sprays and solutions of his own recipe. He was also upset at the mortician, writing:
“Till dawn I worked with every energy, appalled at the negligence of the mortician who had failed to embalm the coffin itself which would have prevented much of the decay, because it was the coffin which smelled awful, not the body.”
I know he was obsessed with Elena and didn’t want to associate her with bad smells, but to my knowledge, a coffin doesn’t get embalmed, only bodies do. Having worked all night to clean her up, Tanzler and the mortician then packed her new casket with sterile cotton and gave Elena a liberal spritzing of eau-de-cologne. The casket was then put inside an airtight metal coffin “held together by a hundred screws”.
This might seem to be the end of it, but here comes the incubator tank made by Tanzler’s own fair hands. Feeling just a bit uneasy about the preservation of Elena’s body, he got her out of the casket again a few days later, put her in the incubation tank and poured in “a certain solution (…) both antiseptic and nourishing for body cells.This I kept pouring until the tank was completely full.”
The tank then went back into the casket. We have to presume that Elena was in the tank and that it still fit into the casket but apparently that’s what happened. When the new tomb was finished, Tanzler referred to it as a “little house” and did up the inside with spaces for candles, a chair for him to sit in and a silk curtain for privacy from the outside world. The door to the mausoleum had three locks, and only Tanzler had the keys.
What Carl Did Next
So far you might be thinking that Carl Tanzler was a bit of a strange old man with a fixation on a younger woman, but what was the harm in lavishing her with gifts when she was dying a slow and painful death? Who cares if he paid for her funeral and bought her a nice big tomb? Well, here’s where the story takes a turn that shifts Carl Tanzler from harmless romantic eccentric to something far, far worse.
After Elena was moved into the mausoleum, Tanzler would visit her every night without fail. Even if he had decided not to go on a particular day, somehow he always felt compelled to drop in on the woman whom he called his “bride”. He would unlock the tomb and sit next to Elena on a little chair, thinking about her, having little chats and presumably not worrying too much about how his life had come to this.
Every day for a year and a half, Tanzler would make his pilgrimage to see Elena. The cemetery was in quite a public area with houses on all sides, so Tanzler became a familiar sight to other visitors and also the families who lived nearby. Apparently he became a bit of a target for the local youth who would “lay siege” on him and he ended up having to involve the police.
Eighteen months after Elena had been moved into her new home, Tanzler reported that all of a sudden, many of the locks on her outer casket sprung open. He linked this to the ghostly visitations he had received when he was a younger man and concluded that Elena must be trying to contact him. He opened the casket and saw that the smaller one inside was still intact, but he opened the incubator valve and a smell wafted out which Tanzler describes as:
“It was exactly like the healthy and agreeable odor of a young womari’s skin, on a warm day. It simply was the typical odor which I loved so much of my bride Elena, and of her hair.”
He also calls it “not any manufactured perfume”, but we must remember that she had been liberally doused in eau de cologne before being resealed inside the casket. According to Tanzler, he then heard Elena’s voice telling him she wanted him to take her back to his house. He said he’d do it, but not until the moon changed, for some reason. He then tries to justify his actions because apparently, when he’d been in India, he’d been taken ill and upon waking up in what he thought was his own bed, he discovered he’d actually been presumed dead and was in a morgue.
Tanzler writes: “From this, my own case, and from many others on record, I knew that death is not the end of life and that resurrection from the grave is actually a possibility.”
Carl, you do know you weren’t actually dead, right? Whether or not that really happened, there is a large difference between someone waking up from a coma or deep unconsciousness and somebody who had been dead, preserved and buried for two years coming back to life.
During the time between Elena somehow reawakening and moving her out of the tomb, Tanzler allegedly had many conversations with her spirit, including lots about how near to completion his plane was, and she started singing a Spanish song to him about a man who opens his dead bride’s grave, so you can probably tell where this is going.
Tanzler spent a couple of nights working out how to best extract Elena from the tomb without anyone noticing, which included using a large blanket to block off a section of fence that could otherwise potentially be looked through by passers-by, and carrying out his plan under the cover of darkness. He also found that there was an empty house backing right on to the graveyard and immediately rented it to set it up as a makeshift laboratory. He needed some way of transporting Elena back to this lab and bought a child’s toy wagon which, when the night of the new moon finally came, he hung out of the lab window along with some other supplies.
He then walked round and collected it from inside the graveyard, hurrying on to Elena’s tomb. He managed to extract her casket from the outer coffin and worked it through the room into the dark night outside. He got it on the little wagon, covered everything with a blanket and tied it down, pulling the wagon and its macabre load through the graveyard.
Here’s how Tanzler decided to remember the experience of illegally removing and transporting a corpse of someone he barely knew:
“It really was a wonderfully lovely journey through this black night along between the rows of graves, with my sweetest bride in her little metal chamber.”
Making his way to the back of his newly rented space, Tanzler had to get the coffin up over the fence and into his window, which he did eventually manage to do, but not without a huge struggle. The first time he tried, he got most of the coffin over the fence but lost his footing and the metal box containing Elena in all her preserved glory crashed down on his head and “squashed (his) new, black felt hat”.
The stopper for the incubation tank also came out, or broke, with the result being that Tanzler had to shove the box up and into the window again, while his own blood and the liquid from inside the tank dripped down all over him. He then went back around to the front of the house and secured the coffin inside, then left it there overnight and walked back to his usual home, still covered in blood and corpse juice as the temporary rental didn’t have any running water.
The next day he drove back to pick up Elena’s casket and took it to where he had been building his plane, which was in a quiet part of the hospital grounds. He managed to get Elena inside the cabin and eventually undid all the screws around the casket, lifting it open to finally see the object of his devotion. Elena, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not in great shape. Her eyes had sunken in and her clothes had started to decay so Tanzler tried removing them as best he could, soaking much of the material so it didn’t get too stuck to her skin.
Eventually he managed to remove all traces of mold and slime, washed and dried her body and cleaned out the casket. And then? Take it away, Carl:
“Then, kissing her dry lips, and breathing deeply into her lungs until her bosom rose, I unpacked her bridal gown and covered her body with it. I draped her with the silk veil and adorned her head and hair with a golden crown. She looked so wonderful now, I could not resist. The wondrous spell and trembling with burning love, I sank gently into the coffin to her and kissed her as if she were alive.”
This might be a good time to say that if this is making you uncomfortable, you should probably bow out now. Carl Tanzler wrote his memoir some nine years after Elena’s death, so around seven years after these events. There is no doubt that he romanticised and embellished details but some passages are so deluded, it makes you wonder if he really did feel these things at the time or whether he was making it all up afterwards. After kissing the corpse, Tanzler went on to say:
“Long I lay thus, holding her closely to me, the living and the dead united in love. The sweetness, of this was divine. Never had I dreamt that she had preserved so sweet and intense a love for me after being in the grave so long. Was it possible?
I could hardly grasp or believe it, but here was the undeniable evidence. Life and death united together, eye to eye. Long and silent we lay. We needed no words.
Words could not express the heavenly bliss that we were experiencing. We were two kindred spirits flowing together. It was soul resting within soul.”
Thank goodness they needed no words as one of them was dead, so that might have put a downer on things. Tanzler also called the fact that Elena’s body was lying next to him “undeniable evidence” that she was in love with him. The only thing it was undeniable evidence of, was that he had robbed her grave and was now preparing to take the next step with her long-dead body.
Tanzler was supposedly a man of science, (remember the nine degrees he apparently got?) and although he did also have an interest in the esoteric, it’s hard to see how he could rationalise what he was doing if he was in his right frame of mind. If his memoir is to be believed, he really thought Elena could be resurrected and thought her spirit was floating about, communicating with him.
The warring sides of science and the supernatural do sometimes come through in his writings, when his descriptions can veer wildly from the romantic to the disgusting. Here’s a brief example:
“Her beautiful hair also needed plenty of washing, as it was still partly glued together and to her scalp. By further examination I was not surprised to discover small maggots of the gnat-larvae type which were feeding on blood around her head and ears and on the surface of the abdomen. I removed them easily with phenol solution.”
He disinfected and washed Elena’s body “frequently” with eau de cologne, perfumed soaps and an ethanol solution. He packed her stomach cavity with sterile material, wrapped up her extremities in disinfectant-soaked bandages as her fingers and toes were not in the best condition, and covered the rest of her skin in a hydrating lotion which, sorry, you can’t replicate as Tanzler gave the recipe as:
“ingredients like olive oil or glycerine and others I wish to keep secret.”
If he was thinking of producing his own skincare line after this case became public, this didn’t end up panning out. If you recall, we mentioned that before her original coffin was closed, Tanzler slipped a letter inside for Elena. If you’d forgotten about it, so had Tanzler until he realised that there was no trace of it anymore. Instead of thinking that Elena must have read it and absorbed it out of love, or whatever, he actually quite reasonably deduced that:
“it probably had been dissolved by the acids which were released by the body.”
He had kept a copy of it for some reason, but it was just a load of boring tripe about their love so we don’t need to reproduce it here.
Tanzler reckoned that Elena’s spirit would not want to return to her body in the state it was in, so he also started pouring “nourishing fluids” into her mouth and apparently, this caused her skin to look better, her hair to regain some curl, and minor injuries to heal. He kept doing this for months and Elena allegedly looked better every day. Tanzler decided to make a plaster cast of her face and put some oiled silk across it before then making a mask from plaster of paris. Unfortunately, though, this process caused the silk to stick tightly to Elena’s skin but I guess it was thin and transparent, as Tanzler ended up thinking this was actually a good way to protect her skin from decay.
Eventually, the man who had given Tanzler permission to build his plane on the hospital grounds died, and his replacement didn’t extend Tanzler the same courtesy and told him he had to move the plane. It seems that Tanzler didn’t have anywhere to live at this time, either, as he was no longer working at the hospital, so he had the plane towed to the beach where he had been told he could build a home and a hangar for the craft. Little did anyone seeing the plane being driven through the town know that the preserved body of Elena de Hoyos was inside.
Tanzler lived inside the plane with Elena while he constructed a large building that was divided into two parts, with the hangar on one side and his lab and living area on the other. Tanzler assembled all his inventions and scientific equipment into the lab, including his million volt transformer, an “electric generating plant”, a large x-ray machine and an operating table. This doesn’t scream “Victor Frankenstein” in the slightest.
OK, it does. Tanzler filled up Elena’s incubator tank with a plasma solution and started this routine where he would take her out of the solution once a day to irradiate her for five minutes with his x-ray machine. Apparently this treatment caused her body to fill out and restored some of her former radiance and her corpse had allegedly regained some 60 pounds or 27 kilos.
Before Tanzler could get her to her desired weight of a few pounds more, however, a task force was dispatched to clean up the beach so that building work could take place there. Tanzler found that some of his windows had been smashed and was worried about Elena’s tank, so out she came for the last time. He covered her in eau de cologne and alcohol again, put her in her “bridal dress” and veils, put jewellery on her gloved hands and installed her in the bed he had bought her - remember, the one she died in and the one he subsequently used.
In case you were wondering, yes, that was the only bed in the place so Tanzler obviously had to sleep next to her. He then basically did nothing all day but play the organ, tend to Elena’s corpse and then go to sleep next to her. Eventually, the pier near his building was demolished for more building work to take place, so Tanzler had to abandon it and find yet another home for all his equipment, his plane and his corpse bride.
He eventually did, although it was a much smaller space, towing the plane through town once again with its grisly cargo.
By this point, to protect her body from insects which seemed to be the biggest threat, Tanzler had covered most of Elena’s skin in that same layer of oiled silk. The disturbing details kept coming, although Tanzler recorded them matter of factly, saying this about the body for example:
“Whenever I discovered another leakage, I sealed it up right away with silk and wax, to stop any plasma from running away. When any part had shrunk in by the loss of fluids, I filled it up with soft sterile cotton packing and overlaid it with silk and wax.”
Despite all his precautions, however, some pesky insects still managed to get through, so Tanzler ended up covering Elena in another layer of silk, which came from her wedding dress as he’d run out of the original supply, and then sealed it all again with wax and balsam. She got a new dress and Tanzler covered the bed with strong-smelling myrtle leaves, not to mask the scent of decay, of course, it was so “everything smelled like this exquisite perfume.”
Because Tanzler no longer had the space for Elena’s incubation tank so she could have her plasma baths, her body started drying out again, and shrivelling. Eventually, Tanzler got word, via Elena’s sister’s husband, that the tomb in the graveyard had been broken into. This was in September 1940. This meant that Tanzler had been living with the corpse of Elena de Hoyos for SEVEN YEARS. It also meant that her family had thought she was still safely in her mausoleum this whole time. It seems that Elena’s sister, Nana, had become suspicious of Tanzler, who had abruptly stopped visiting the cemetery after previously visiting every day without fail. He had disappeared, reappeared, bought women’s clothing, and so rumours had begun to spread, especially when a neighbourhood boy spotted Tanzler dancing with what looked like a life-size mannequin. Nana demanded that he open up the vault so she could see the coffin but he refused. Tanzler agreed to talk things over with her and took her back to his house, where he decided to show her the corpse of her sister, lying in bed, dressed and covered in jewellery. And that spelled the end for Tanzler’s romantic life with Elena.
Carl Is Found Out
Of course, when she realised that Tanzler had been living with her sisters’ dead body for seven years, Nana was quite upset. She left the house and a couple of days later, police turned up to arrest Tanzler for being in possession of a dead body. The actual charge was “Accused of wantonly and maliciously demolishing, disfiguring and destroying a grave.” Tanzler was taken to jail and Elena’s body was moved to the funeral home for safe keeping. If Tanzler’s memoirs are to be believed, he became quite the cause célèbre, with the story spreading and other people, especially young women from Elena’s old stomping grounds, finding it extremely romantic and coming to the jail to show their support for this weird old man.
If you thought Elena was finally safe, though, you’d be wrong. She was put on display at the funeral parlour for anybody to come and see, and while Tanzler’s writings portray her as basically looking the same as when she was alive, photos of her corpse show what looks like a wonky waxwork figure with fake eyes, drawn on eyebrows and a wig. It is a horrible travesty not only of Elena herself, but of a woman in general. Tanzler had not given these details himself, as he seemed to be far more concerned with the plasma bath and oiled silk descriptions, but her corpse had been held together with piano wires and coat hangers and her eyes were replaced with glass ones. Tanzler wrote about her hair regaining its lustre but in reality, he made a wig from the hair Elena’s mother had given him and used that when Elena’s hair fell out due to natural decomposition. You have probably been wondering whether Tanzler was doing anything else besides just lying chastely next to the woman he spent so much time and money on. Well, opinions are mixed but it seems highly unlikely that he didn’t do anything, right? He did rig up a curtain to maintain her privacy on her half of the bed, but come on. A curtain is no obstacle to a man in the throes of a deep obsession. He obviously doesn’t mention anything explicitly necrophilic in his memoir, and nothing was officially reported at the time after her corpse was examined, however, in books that have come out since, such as 2003’s “Von Cosel: A True Story” by Tom Swicegood, he makes specific mention of a rudimentary technique Tanzler used, which was just the insertion of cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, lubed up on the inside and with a bit of cotton wool in the bottom to catch - you know - any stuff.
One of the doctors who checked Elena’s corpse after it had been found did tell reporters about this tube and said he even found sperm in the cotton wool, but this wasn’t until 1972, several decades after the events, so we don’t need to dwell on this aspect of the story and it was not in the news at the time.
Instead of being laid back to rest, poor old Elena was gawked at by nearly 7000 people who came to the funeral parlour to check out her body when Tanzler was in jail. Photos of what had become of her are easily found and, when you compare them with what she looked like when alive, it’s really depressing.
During his hearing, more details about what Tanzler planned to do with Elena came out, including that he wanted to use the plane he was building to send the body:
“high into the stratosphere, so that radiation from outer space could penetrate Elena’s tissues and restore life to her somnolent form.”
Whether this was the aim from the get-go is unclear, and while Tanzler had built what he referred to as “Elena’s airship”, i.e. the plane that she was stored in for a while, it was not in any kind of working condition and certainly not advanced enough to do any stratospheric radiation experiments. From a photo taken of it, it seems more like a basic model of a plane rather than a functioning flying machine and Tanzler seems to have only used it as a makeshift lab and somewhere to store Elena’s body when he was between houses.
While Tanzler was in jail, Elena’s body was released to her sister, who, thankfully, had her reburied in an undisclosed location. Tanzler writes that this decision left him “thunderstruck”, however, as he wasn’t actually married to Elena, or related to her in any way, he didn’t have the rights to her body. When you read his memoir, which he wrote shortly after leaving jail, it is so deluded that it’s difficult to believe he was mentally stable, however, he was apparently examined by three doctors, who all found him sane, even with the “reanimation of Elena’s corpse in space” storyline.
He was released on bail after a week or so but, while he was found competent to stand trial, it ended up being dropped as the statute of limitations for grave robbing was only two years at the time, so it had long expired. As Tanzler hadn’t killed anybody and had given the impression of trying to preserve his lost love, public opinion was quite favourable towards him so he just slotted back into his niche as a lonely oddball, rather than, say, being hounded out of town for messing with a dead body for seven years.
The Final Act
Tanzler just got on with his life quietly for a bit, but did let looky-loos see the place he had lived with Elena for 25 cents a pop. Four years or so after his arrest, Tanzler left town to be closer to someone that we all remember but he had conveniently forgotten about until now - his real, actual, legal wife, Doris, who was still in Zephyrhills, Florida. Sadly, one of his daughters had died at the age of 10 in 1934, while he was in the throes of his obsession, and it seems unlikely that he had any dealing at all with his family after he upped and left not long after they had made the journey over from Europe.
Elena was never far from Tanzler’s thoughts, however. He detailed how, early on in the preservation process, he had made several plaster casts of her face and indeed, after her body was taken from him, it seems that he just decided to make a replacement. Accounts differ as to whether Tanzler made another life-sized effigy of Elena or just had the death mask around, but she was still very much in evidence in his home. Tom Swicegood who wrote “Von Cosel: A true Story”, is of the belief that Tanzler somehow managed to get his hands on Elena’s remains once more, and that it was her actual body again, and not an effigy, that was found in his home after his death, but his book does seem a tad sensationalised. Carl Tanzler died in 1952 at the age of 75. He was basically destitute by this point and wasn’t found until three weeks after his death. Whether his soul joined that of Elena’s in the afterlife, one can only hope for her sake that it didn’t.
If we take Tanzler’s side of the story as true, it seems that Elena really did want to be in a relationship with him prior to her death, as they spent quite a lot of time together and he treated her in her home and bought her lots of gifts. But we only have his thoughts, almost ten years after they first met, and his memoir is written with such obvious exaggeration and embellishment that it’s extremely difficult to work out if any of their original interactions would have been in any way like Tanzler presents. And I don’t want to diss on him unnecessarily, but he seemed to be one of those guys who looks old from the time they’re about 40.
Would Elena, a teenager at the time they first met, really be attracted to this middle-aged hospital tech? Or was she too sick to put up much resistance to his flattery and, because of her family’s financial troubles, welcomed the gifts Tanzler gave her? We do not know Elena’s side of the story, but what we can say for certain is that she didn’t want some older guy she barely knew digging up her body and then doing god knows what with it for over seven years.
I think it’s safe to say that.
Was Carl Tanzler sane? He had had visions and spiritual visitations as a young man, said he heard Elena’s voice talking to him and was convinced that she was the woman from his visions. He was totally obsessed with her, abandoned his family, made extremely poor judgement calls and was fixated on the preservation of her body with the alleged belief that he could bring her back to life. If not classed as “insane”, he must at least have been suffering from some sort of mental health condition to not realise that what he was doing was totally irrational.
Tanzler has been likened to the “Butcher of Plainfield”, Ed Gein, and while they share horrifying similarities, they have somehow been cast almost at opposite ends of this macabre fixation. While Gein committed murderers and dug up other bodies for his ghoulish activities, both men were fixated on women and their corpses. Both used methods of preservation on the dead bodies, with Gein tanning and drying human skin to then use it to make horrifying trophies, and Tanzler using wax, plaster, and replacing things like Elena’s eyes and hair to try and keep her body intact.
Tanzler was fixated on Elena de Hoyos, Gein was obsessed with his mother, and both men’s crimes started after the women’s deaths. While he obviously went to far greater lengths than Tanzler, Gein was declared legally insane and not guilty of his crimes by reason of insanity. Tanzler wasn’t tried because of a technicality but had been declared fit to stand trial, so who knows how that might have gone.
Time has sort of been on Tanzler’s side, as many articles are slanted to portray him either as a weird eccentric, or as someone in the grip of a passionate love for a deceased woman. He’s usually presented almost comically rather than criminally, with people pretending to be shocked at the story, but who still relish finding out the gory details of his life with a corpse.
If we consider the story from Elena’s point of view, she lost a baby, lost her husband and died tragically young from a horrible, wasting disease. If that wasn’t bad enough, her body was moved to a tomb where the radiology assistant from her hospital appointments visited her every day and had the only set of keys. And if THAT wasn’t bad enough, he then took her corpse, stuffed it, wired it together, covered it in wax and did who knows what with it for a third of the time she was actually alive. The messed-up remains were then put on full display for thousands of people to view, while the person who did this to her received no punishment and was actually thought of as an old romantic. Some people don’t care what happens to their body after they die, but I doubt there’s anyone who would really be ok with this happening to them.
Key Takeaways
- Carl Tanzler, a German-born radiology assistant, became obsessed with tuberculosis patient Elena de Hoyos after claiming she matched a childhood vision of his destined bride.
- After Elena died in 1931 at age 22, Tanzler built her a mausoleum, visited nightly for 18 months, then stole her corpse and lived with it for seven years.
- Tanzler preserved Elena’s body using homemade chemicals, wax, silk, plaster masks, glass eyes, and wigs made from her own hair, while sleeping beside her in her former bed.
- He was arrested in 1940 after Elena’s sister discovered the corpse, but charges were dropped because the two-year statute of limitations for grave robbing had expired.
- Despite his clearly delusional beliefs about resurrecting Elena, three doctors declared Tanzler sane, and public opinion largely viewed him as a romantic eccentric rather than a criminal.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Carl Tanzler and what aliases did he use?
Carl Tanzler was a German-born man (born 1877 in Dresden) who became infamous for living with the corpse of Elena de Hoyos for seven years. He used multiple names including ‘Georg Karl Tänzler’, ‘Karl Tänzler von Cosel’, and ‘Count Carl von Cosel’—though he was not actually a count.
How did Carl Tanzler claim to have first seen Elena de Hoyos before meeting her?
Tanzler claimed that at age 12, he had a vision of a beautiful girl in a white dress. Decades later, while traveling, he found a marble statue in a Genoa, Italy cemetery memorializing a woman named Elena who died at age 22. He believed the statue matched his vision and that the figure came alive and walked past him.
What was Elena de Hoyos’s background and how did she meet Tanzler?
Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was born in 1909 to a Cuban family in Key West, Florida. She married Luis Mesa in 1926, suffered a miscarriage, and developed tuberculosis (‘hasty consumption’). She met Tanzler in April 1930 when she went to the US Marine Hospital for tests and he took her blood. Tanzler, a 50-year-old radiology assistant, immediately became obsessed with her.
What treatments did Tanzler administer to Elena while she was alive?
Tanzler brought equipment to Elena’s family home and administered treatments including putting electrical tubes down her throat, applying high-frequency radiation baths over her neck and chest, and giving her liquid gold to drink. He also bought her gifts including a diamond ring (which he called an engagement ring), clothes, furniture, and silk items.
How did Tanzler preserve Elena’s body after her death?
After Elena died on October 25, 1931, Tanzler arranged her burial, then later had her moved to a mausoleum he built. When he eventually stole her body, he preserved it using various methods: cleaning it with sprays and solutions, packing cavities with sterile material, wrapping extremities in disinfectant-soaked bandages, covering skin with hydrating lotion, using an incubation tank with antiseptic/nourishing solution, applying layers of oiled silk and wax, replacing her eyes with glass ones, making a wig from her real hair, and holding her body together with piano wires and coat hangers.
How did Tanzler steal Elena’s body from the mausoleum?
Eighteen months after Elena’s burial, Tanzler claimed locks on her casket sprang open and he heard her voice telling him to take her home. He rented a house backing onto the graveyard as a makeshift laboratory, bought a child’s toy wagon, and under cover of darkness extracted her casket, wheeled it through the cemetery, and struggled to get it over a fence and through a window—during which the incubation tank broke and spilled liquid on him along with his own blood.
Where did Tanzler live with Elena’s corpse?
Tanzler initially stored Elena’s body in a plane he was building on hospital grounds. He then lived with her inside the plane while constructing a building with a hangar and living area. After being forced to move, he towed the plane through town to a smaller space. Eventually he settled in another home where he kept Elena in bed, playing organ and tending to her corpse daily.
How was Tanzler discovered and what legal consequences did he face?
In September 1940, Elena’s sister Nana became suspicious after Tanzler abruptly stopped visiting the cemetery, had been seen buying women’s clothing, and was spotted dancing with what appeared to be a life-size mannequin. When Nana visited his home, he showed her Elena’s corpse. Police arrested him for ‘wantonly and maliciously demolishing, disfiguring and destroying a grave.’ He was jailed for about a week, found sane by three doctors, but the case was dropped because the two-year statute of limitations for grave robbing had expired.
What was Tanzler’s stated plan for using the airplane he built?
Tanzler claimed he wanted to fly Elena’s body ‘high into the stratosphere, so that radiation from outer space could penetrate Elena’s tissues and restore life to her somnolent form.’ However, the plane was not actually functional and appeared to be a basic model rather than an advanced flying machine; he primarily used it as a makeshift lab and storage space for her body.
What happened to Tanzler after Elena’s body was taken from him?
After his arrest, Tanzler was released on bail and the charges were dropped due to expired statute of limitations. He briefly showed his living space to visitors for 25 cents. About four years later, he moved to Zephyrhills, Florida to be near his legal wife Doris, whom he had abandoned years earlier. He had apparently had no contact with his family during his obsession with Elena.
He died in 1952 at age 75, destitute and not found until three weeks after his death. He may have created an effigy or somehow obtained Elena’s remains again, as a body was reportedly found in his home after his death.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Carl Tanzler: The Depraved Man Who Lived With a Corpse for 7 Years
- Hero image source by Adbh266 / openverse, by-sa.
